


Time Will Tell

by charlottechill



Series: How Surely Things March with the Times [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon LGBTQ Character, Canon LGBTQ Male Character, Canon Temporary Character Death, Enemies to Friends, Historical, Immortality, Immortals, Joe is an amazingly gentle and heartfelt man for a soldier, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Soldiers, Some Humor, description of violence canon-typical (maybe less), hurt/comfort...kinda, teen rating for sack of Jerusalem, they both got in way over their heads in the crusades
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26525137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charlottechill/pseuds/charlottechill
Summary: The sound only expanded his grief, and Yusuf waved a hand when the Frank looked wildly about for him.“Had enough, Nicolo?”Nicolo di Genoa—the man had announced himself many times before driving his sword home:I am Nicolo di Genoa, a soldier for Christ—scowled. “Do not use my name.”“You liked it no better when I called you a pig or a dog.” Yusuf shrugged. “I thought, perhaps, I would try your name.”--OR--Everybody has an angle on the crusades
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: How Surely Things March with the Times [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1928725
Comments: 18
Kudos: 111





	1. Chapter 1

July 16, 1099 Al-Quds _(Jerusalem)_

Yusuf didn’t understand it—not now, not a week ago, and probably he never would, how the Frank beside twitched again with life. Amidst the stench of rotting bodies, pupils shrank in those sickly pale eyes beneath the harsh noonday sun. His muscles tightened as he groaned and moved his fist, then the demon jerked at the scimitar lodged in his lung and flung it aside. He choked on fresh blood, new froth formed on his lips, and he died again before the wounds closed.

Yusuf smiled grimly; two for the price of one.

Had they not grappled to exhaustion before burying their blades in each other, he might have felt victorious. Had any one of the dozens of deaths they had endured at the hand of the other stuck, he might have felt relieved.

He felt neither.

Eight days past when they each had first risen from death, a frenzy had taken them and they had fought that day and night and all the next day. When they’d paused for water and breath, they’d found that the battle had moved on without them. The invader had turned narrowed eyes toward him; Yusuf had felt his own eyes narrow in reply. They did not follow the war.

That second night had begun a wary pattern. It wasn’t a truce, but a silently agreed-upon pause when darkness fell. They would separate to find safety behind the body of a horse or an overturned wagon, and sleep in the relatively cool night air. Yusuf would wake before dawn, use sand as he could for well-intended but miserably insufficient wudu, and perform his rakahs quickly, lest the Christian find him and kill him at prayer. With each sunrise, they found each other again and tried again with what violence and determination remained, to end the other once and for all.

Who shared rest breaks with their enemy after only a week of trying to conquer them?

Not Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysahi.

Not anymore.

The past half-day had been the fiercest. Their clothes were in tatters, they had run each other through so many times. Yusuf had lost a boot somehow, and his helmet and shield were long gone. He’d been forced to shed his outer robe when blood made it so heavy he could no longer move freely. 

The Frank woke coughing out some damaged parts of himself. The sound only expanded his grief, and Yusuf waved a hand when his enemy looked wildly about for him.

“Had enough, Nicolo?”

Nicolo di Genoa—the man had announced himself on many occasions before driving his sword home: _I am Nicolo di Genoa, a soldier for Christ_ —scowled.

“Do not use my name.”

“You liked it no better when I called you a pig or a dog.” Yusuf shrugged. “I thought, perhaps, I would try your name.”

Nicolo rolled to his belly as he reached for his fallen sword, but Yusuf was ready. He scrambled atop him and held him to the ground, wrapped one hand around the flailing wrist and his elbow around the pale throat. His enemy’s struggles weakened as he lost his air.

“How many Muslims have you killed in your quest to claim Al-Quds?” he asked, his chest rising and falling with the heavy breaths of his nemesis.

The man said nothing.

“I have killed other Christians besides you. Weeks ago, when your people first tried to take the city.” He let go Nicolo’s hand so he could raise his, flex muscle and tendon and let them both see how well it still worked. “I even killed Muslim invaders last year, the Turks who held the city before our caliphate liberated it. Between that war and this, I injured myself. Had a wooden nail removed from my palm and waited like a normal, uncursed man while it healed. Did that ever happen to you, before we met?”

Nicolo bucked beneath him. “Burn in Hell.”

He tightened his hold on the man’s throat. “And then came your reinforcements from Yafa.”

He could see it all, fresh memories and fresh fear as they watched the engineers and supplies brought from the port city. Skirmishes here and there as Arab and Imazighen and every other tribe under the caliphate sent its best out to worry the enemy and do what it could. Hopeful whispers had gone quiet within Al-Quds’ walls.

Nicolo bucked again, trying and failing to free himself. “Get off me!”

“We watched your infantry filling the moat, your reinforcements building your machines to breach the wall. Then last week I followed my captain out in the night with a plan to set fire to your battering ram. You and I met instead and this cursed nightmare began.”

Nicolo di Genoa went still beneath him, panicked perhaps. Waking from death again and again only to plunge each other back into it in increasingly brutal ways had lost its ability to horrify. But the silent enemy he had fought for days, opening his mouth with this morning’s sunrise and revealing himself to be conversant in Latin? Nicolo had frozen like a rabbit.

“My people gave way. Your people are still killing them. They’re killing everyone.” Nicolo wrestled desperately enough that Yusuf grabbed him by the hair and pulled his shoulders up off the ground. “You ignorant fool! You speak no Arabic. You and your fellow invaders don’t know the words for _mercy_ or _surrender_. Look, _Nicolo di Genoa_. See what you have wrought in the name of God!”

The man slumped in his grasp and Yusuf climb off him. He retrieved his scimitar. His trousers and shirts were stiff as thatched reeds, ruined by his blood and his enemy’s that had spilled and stained and congealed on them both. By spatter of the bodies from the men they had killed before they’d fallen upon each other. But the scourge had moved on, taken the city, done such things as Yusef hadn’t imagined men would do, and shaken his faith.

“I saw it, last night.”

“Saw what?”

“Inside the city. Your people burned the synagogues and polluted the mosques. Slaughtered indiscriminately. They’re keeping for themselves those who appeal to them: women, boys—goats for all I know. I heard screams unbroken from the moment I was near enough until I fled. Blood flows in the streets like a flood.”

“You lie!”

Yusuf stabbed him again, then he curled in on himself and grieved.

He was still crying when Nicolo came back.

“What are you... are you…?”

A hand touched his shoulder and he flung himself away, waiting for his turn in the lie that was death. But it did not come. He sobbed for his brothers and sisters in Allah, and for his failure to protect them or join them for judgment. He cried for his own pity, that he had become this _thing_. He cried until the desert took the last of the water from him, until he had no tears left and was purged.

Something bounced beside his head. It was a water skin, the camel-bone collar clearly of Fatimid design. Not the Christians’ water, he hoped. He took a long swallow.

“Wash your face,” Nicolo said.

“Go fuck a camel.”

The Frank frowned, and Yusuf considered the limits of Latin.

“Please.” Nicolo seemed desperate. “Your tears have washed off much dirt and blood already. It can’t be much work to finish the job. Don’t your gods require cleanliness?”

“My—” Yusuf blew out a breath in disgust. “My god is your god, you fool. The God of Abraham, the God who sent Mousa and Isa and Mohammed, peace be upon them, the singular and true God. Don’t make me kill you again. I’ve lost the will for it.”

Yusuf wanted to pray, but he couldn’t while covered in filth, and he would not clean himself after the foolish idiot had told him to.

The city was blessedly distant, far enough that he couldn’t hear the plunder. All but smoke and the high watchtowers was hidden by a rise in the land. He just listened to flies and carrion birds that picked on carcasses of the dead, grateful his nose was already overwhelmed by the stink of it all. The shadow cast by his boot shortened as the sun climbed.

A larger shadow, idiot-shaped, covered him and swallowed his observation.

“Kill me or leave me alone.”

“I…”

Annoyance crept in, a gentle breeze after the fury that had lain them both waste. He looked over his shoulder, saw the clean-shaven face and clean clothes that didn’t quite fit. Clean hands. Cleaned sword. “You’re picking over the dead?”

Nicolo shook his head. “Supply depot in the rear guard. It’s not far from here, actually. The water we’ve collected is foul, though. For safe water, we’ll need to pick over _your_ dead.”

“I’m not thirsty.”

The invader sighed, and the shadow moved off.

The sun moved another degree.

Nicolo returned, but Yusuf didn’t move. He just tracked the sun’s advance by the fool’s dark, stark outline. “Drink water at least.Please!” Nicolo said again.

“Stop begging.”

“What would you have me do? I do not know your name.”

“No, you don’t.” Yusuf returned to contemplating his boot until the shadow disappeared beneath its sole. “How many Muslims have you killed this month?”

Nicolo dropped down beside him, resting back on his elbows. “Why do you keep asking me that?”

Yusuf blinked to glare at him. “Why won’t you answer?” Sunlight filled the unnatural pale eyes. “I killed many Catholic infidels in my effort to defend this place.”

Nicolo grimaced and Yusuf knew why. “I ask again, Nicolo di Genoa; how many Muslims have you killed on your quest to take the city?”

“Many,” Nicolo sneered. “More than I can remember. What does it matter?”

He was lying, that was plain to see. But perhaps it didn’t matter. “Because until today in this war, I had killed none. Until today in my entire life, I had killed only in defense of my homeland, only for righteous cause.”

Nicolo pushed himself up and onto his ass, impossibly fastidious as he tried to clear layers of gore from Yusuf’s discarded, blood-stained clothes.

He no longer felt empty inside, and he missed the feeling. “This morning, I killed you and kept killing you, I will admit in a fruitless effort to vent my despair over what is going on in Al-Quds.” He pointed toward the city. “A brother saw you die and heal. He saw profit and sorcery in you and wanted my help to steal you away.”

Nicolo huffed a breath of laughter. “That’s ridiculous.”

“He had you gagged and your hands bound before he finished presenting his plan,” Yusuf said.

Nicolo stopped laughing.

Yusuf nodded, and let his head hang down. He felt the sun heat his neck. “I killed him. I killed an ally because he witnessed you rising. I killed a brother for you. Then I killed you again, to hide that sin.” He felt his stomach clench, dry sobs and agonized regret. “What have you made me?”

“What have I made _you_?

The madman had grabbed his sword by the blade, and his blood flowed freely from his palm and fingers. He shook his head like a bull, a wild look about his eyes that told Yusuf he was going to die again.

Good. Let it be the last. Let him go to Allah and beg forgiveness for what he had done.

They grunted together, faces a few inches apart. Yusuf felt the lacerating pain and looked down at blood pouring out of him, at blood spurting from the bone-deep wounds in Nicolo’s hands. It hurt like death. It felt like it should be death.

He knew it wasn’t, and found he could not surrender after all; he used his dagger to slit Nicolo’s throat. Birds squawked. Flies buzzed as the world faded.

When he woke, Nicolo sat watching him, his new clothes blood-darkened, his eyes narrowed, chewing on a knuckle. The sun was still high.

“You killed _me,_ ” Nicolo said. He had clearly returned from death first, removed his sword from Yusuf’s belly, and sat there waiting for Yusuf so he could say it. “You wrought your magic upon _me_. I am innocent in this.”

Yusuf poked his finger through the new hole in his shirt and felt the smooth skin where there was no more pain, no wound, no scar. “I think neither of us can claim innocence anymore.”

Nicolo sighed. “We may make our plans,” he said, and sighed. “I need fresh clothes again. You must find your own.”

Yusuf didn’t move, so Nicolo, the damned cursed creature, upended the waterskin over his head. He sputtered, shaking out his hair. Dark pink droplets flew.

“I’ll find more water,” Nicolo said, and strode away.

He couldn’t avoid it, really. The water had soaked his shirt enough that the blood no longer stuck it to his body. He eased out of his layers, felt the scant breeze as the mess cracked and flaked off him, and sweat on his bare skin. The next water Nicolo brought, Yusuf held out his hands for, and having skin clean to the waist sharpened the contrast with the stains on his soul.

The water was evaporating, cooling him, and he stretched to let his armpits dry too. When Nicolo returned with more waterskins, Yusuf took himself away for privacy and washed the rest of himself, truly clean for the first time since this unnatural battle had begun. He stood in the sun, let the heat soothe the naked parts of him, let his mind drift.

“What are you--? Oh.” Nicolo stopped abruptly and cast his gaze toward the ground. “What are you waiting for?”

Yusuf picked up his ruined clothes and held them in front of himself, a pointless shield. “I can’t stomach putting these back on.”

Nicolo looked up then, furtive darting glances between Yusuf and the ground, a wagon, the horizon. “I’ll be back.”

He returned with crumpled robes and three pairs of shoes, clothes he must have collected from the knapsacks of corpses.

Yusuf took the larger robe and wrapped it around himself, grateful to be covered. “You can just… do that, so easily? Plunder corpses?”

Nicolo blew out a breath. “What exactly did you plan to do? Walk naked to the next town? Back into the city, perhaps?”

Yusuf knew this man was trying to be kind. He didn’t welcome this change to their rhythm of fight-die-rise-fight… sleep through the night, wake to begin again… fight-die-rise-fight-sleep-then-wake-again. Nor did he want to return to it.

In just a robe and sandals, he felt more like a Bedouin than a soldier, so he picked up his scabbard and blades. “Do you think someone else would have better luck?”

“At what?”

“We are unsuccessful at killing each other. Perhaps it is just us. I cannot kill you, and you cannot kill me. But what if we fought someone else?”

“We might create more of ourselves.”

“Or they might bring us to our natural end.”

“You are very dark,” Nicolo said.

“I am tired. I have fought for that city twice in two years, only to see her people slaughtered like infected animals by yours. We may have been better to leave it to the Turks.”

Nicolo seemed at odds with himself, fidgeting with his clothes and his sword belt. “Is the city really as you said?”

Yusuf nodded.

“And you know a way in?”

Yusuf nodded.

“Take me there.”

Yusuf shook his head.

Nicolo scowled at him. “I could walk through the gate. You, they might kill, if it’s as you say.”

Yusuf waved a hand. “Then walk through the gate! Go! There can’t be many left to pillage.”

“I…” he stood there with his mouth open, stupid and pale and cow eyed. “I marched through Anatolia and the Levant. We were… cruel… at times with the people who resisted us, and we survived as we must. But I never saw things such as you describe. Show me what you say you saw. Please.”

Yusuf needed new clothes and supplies anyway. “Fine. When the sun is lower. Call me your prisoner, if someone stops us. Claim your own right to kill or rape or torture me, because if I wake from death at the hands of another and my curse is discovered, I will expose you as the same kind.”

Nicolo looked unhappy. “Fine.”

Nicolo went behind a rock wall that had once bordered a garden and came back with a sack. He pulled out figs and dried apples, cheeses, olives and smoked fish. By the time he had set the food on a clean bit of rock, Yusuf’s mouth was watering.

Nicolo looked up. “Are you hungry?”

He made a show of indifference and ignored the other man’s smirk. Soon they were eating like stray dogs who had found a ration of fresh meat, smiling at the pleasure of it.

“I know,” Nicolo said, huffing soft laughter. “Something this simple.”

They said little after their bellies were full, content to hide in the shade. Nicolo kept a watch that Yusuf found suspicious. Once, voices approached and he said, “Play dead,” and slipped away. Yusuf listened to a conversation in the lingua franca, too quiet for him to make out the words. He gripped the hilt of his scimitar, thinking of the man who’d tried to truss Nicolo up for profit.

Nicolo returned alone, disgruntled, silent.

They set off soon after, skirting the camp followers and reaching the southwest walls near sunset, when men’s eyes would be blinded down here. The drainage tunnel was pitch-black, and sludge on its bottom sucked at his sandals like muck.

“Are we walking in shit?”

“We’re walking in blood,” Yusuf whispered. “Be quiet, sound travels.”

He took Nicolo up through the Jewish quarter where he had gone the night before, along streets where sluggish streams of blood still flowed. He tried to ignore the revel of the invaders, the sounds of apartments being tossed and broken as the crusaders plundered the riches of the dead.

“They massacred all the Jews,” Yusuf whispered, pausing behind the smoldering husk of a synagogue. Bodies littered the street. “But they have, as far as I could tell, ignored the Christian quarters.” He’d thought they would go there, reclaim those parts that were most rightfully theirs.

As they made their way up the hill, they met two pairs of sentries. Each time, Nicolo handled him roughly. Each time, Yusuf hung his head and grit his teeth.

“Where are we going?” Nicolo asked as they climbed.

“My watch’s quarters, beyond the mosque. They must be emptied by now.”

At the top of the hill, he followed a narrow walkway into the courtyard west of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and stopped so abruptly that Nicolo ran into him. In the early dusk and the flare of watchfires, he could see the people being raped or killed like human sacrifices on its steps. The bodies piled like cordwood. The building itself defiled with the graffiti of the Catholics.

To the north, soldiers milled about the Dome of the Rock, and horses had been tied among the trees. This city had government buildings and stables. It was literally a fort, but the soldiers were quartering in the Dome.

Nicolo grabbed his arm and shoved his back to the wall, knocking the breath out of him. A hand covered his mouth. “Don’t!” Nicolo hissed. “You think you can kill them by the thousands?” He didn’t know what he’d been doing to inspire the reaction, but he let himself be dragged away and back down the hill.

His ears rang, his heart pounded, and he felt a vibration inside his skull that he couldn’t shake out. Sweat slicked his palms and the folds of his body. He led the way back toward the secret tunnel, but Nicolo jerked on his arm not far from the wall.

“Here? Can you find clothes here?” Nicolo asked. “The signs of a soldier would have put you at risk, anyway.”

They were in the Armenian quarter, empty of its Christians for weeks now. Yusuf nodded and pushed into a home, lit a lamp and donned serviceable if unfamiliar clothes. He found boots and put them into the bag with his blades. They ducked back into the alley.

A pair of Catholic soldiers approached, complaining to each other about the lack of spoils here.

The buzzing increased and he felt like he might fly apart. “They were sent away,” Yusuf said in Latin. “We let them leave in safety, with their belongings, before you came.”

“We?” The soldier’s hand moved to his sword.

Nicolo said, “Take them.”

Yusuf did, more quickly and with more fury than he had ever killed anyone but the man behind him. He used his body first, then Nicolo’s offered blade, before they ran out through the drainage tunnel and paused outside the wall, where Nicolo dropped to his knees and vomited.

 _All that food_ , Yusuf thought dumbly.

Nicolo who had pushed him and dragged him and kept him from a suicidal and faithless jihad, was on his knees, belly hollowing up, grunting and retching into the dirt. Yusuf didn’t know why he purged, but when it was over he was up again and moving, and Yusuf followed his shadow through the remains of dusk. He acted only when instinct bade him, when Nicolo turned down a wrong path or toward a road or gate where an enemy would have placed sentries… where his own army had placed sentries the year before. When they reached the familiar field of their many deaths, Nicolo kept moving, further afield from his army until they reached a stone wall that surrounded an empty field. Nicolo dropped to his ass, back to its wall, staring at distant fires that dotted the land.

Yusuf sat a few feet from him.

The shock had faded as they ran, but his mind remained blissfully vague. He hadn’t believed the breadth of the atrocities the Christians brought with them.

The stars moved in the sky.

“What… are you…?” were Nicolo’s first words since they’d left the city. “Please!” He pivoted onto his knee and used the sleeve of his shirt, and Yusuf knew then that he was crying again.

He blinked up at the dark silhouette of Nicolo’s head, limned by stars, only the pale eyes catching tiny points of light, and let the man wipe at his face. “Why do you keep saying ‘please’?”

“Because I still don’t know your name.”

Nicolo sounded angry, and after all of this, everything: meeting him on the field, dying and rising, the frenzy of their fighting, the loss and horror and realization… protecting Nicolo, being fed and protected in turn… Yusuf started laughing.

He tried to stifle the noise in his hand, in Nicolo’s ribs, wherever he could, but he laughed until his stomach ached, until he couldn’t breathe, until he feared he would cause his own death with it. Nicolo wrestled with him at first, but then shoved him onto his side, and when the waves passed he looked to find Nicolo leaning against the wall, knees up, elbows resting upon them, fists clenched, face stony.

“That was funny to you?”

“Oh,” he said, swiping at his eyes and nose and beard. “That we have come through all of this and I have cursed your name in every way and language and dialect I know, and you don’t know what to call me?” He sniffed. “No, I suppose it isn’t.” He placed his hand on his chest. “Yusef ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Al-Kaysahi, called Al-Tayyib.”

The low moon had risen. Nicolo frowned with his mouth open. It made him look incredibly stupid. “What is that?”

“It is my name.”

He seemed unconvinced. “All of that is your name?”

“Call me Yusuf.”

“Yusuf. Don’t do that again. I thought you’d lost your mind.”

He may well have. “Why did you lose your meal?”

“What?”

“You vomited. Because you allowed me to kill your soldiers? Or…”

“I’ve seen soldiers killed.” Nicolo’s voice was hard. “I… I have killed unarmed men and participated in other things. Bloodlust is a devilish thing.

“But what we saw? Yusuf, how many do you think would have to be slaughtered, to make blood run in rivers like that?”

Yusuf shook his head. “It’s like something from the Jewish texts, isn’t it?”

Nicolo hung his head. “I can’t…. May I sleep for an hour? You’ll wake me if you hear anyone approach?”

Yusuf blinked in surprise. “I will.”

Nicolo curled on his left side, one arm under his head, and eventually his breaths evened out as Yusuf had heard them do on nights past.

Yusuf knew soldiers. He knew honor. This man was the first and perhaps he had the second, and Yusuf knew one thing to his bones: Nicolo di Genoa had not known the war he had chosen.


	2. The Lord Determines Our Steps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He put the knife to his skin a second time, cut so deep the tendons were ruined, and grunted at the pain, and the tendons knitted together and the wound closed. He set the knife a third time but Nicolo was there, knocking his hand away. 
> 
> “Damn you! What if that worked?”
> 
> Yusuf shook his head and held up his wrist to show the dark blood. “I did it twice before you woke. Nothing.”

When the darkness faded in that time before dawn, Yusuf rummaged in his sack for a dagger and unsheathed the blade. He couldn’t let this stand. Pushing the sleeves of his foreign shirt up his arms, he cut a straight line across his wrist. It stung, and blood flowed freely, and the wound closed while he stared. His skin itched and crawled at the unnaturalness of that. He put the knife to his skin a second time, cut so deep the tendons were ruined, and grunted at the pain, and the tendons knitted together and the wound closed. He set the knife a third time but Nicolo was there, knocking his hand away.

“Damn you! What if that worked?”

Yusuf shook his head and held up his wrist to show the dark blood. “I did it twice before you woke. Nothing.”

“Yes.” Nicolo sounded glum. “Me too. Day before yesterday, when we parted to rest. Though I must admit that I cut the wrong direction and killed myself.”

Yusuf tried and failed to hide his grin. “There was no reason you had to admit that. I wouldn’t have.”

They sat in silence as the sun rose, casting warm orange hues on the golden desert rock and sand.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Nicolo whispered.

It was, but Yusuf feared it heralded nothing good.

Nicolo found a flat stick and used it to dig the blood and grime from beneath his too-long nails. Then he threw the stick away and stood. “I’m hungry,” he said. “I will go to the supply depot and collect more food.” He seemed reluctant to leave, though. After minutes he said, “You will be safe here? What if soldiers come along?”

This worry was ridiculous and charming. “It’s not like they can kill me.”

Nicolo scowled. “Come with me for a time. We’re far from where we were, and clearly, no one is making time yet for Christian burials.”

They walked together until they heard the first patrols, then found a well enough hidden place. Nicolo looked torn. “Would you not…?”

“What?”

“I know I urged you forward last night. I was overcome by my witness of their wickedness. But if you would not… would you please not kill anyone? I think I am done with death for today.”

Yusuf nodded. “Do the same for me, and if I am not attacked I will not kill.”

Nicolo touched his arm. “God be with you.”

“ _W’aleykom elsalam_.”

Nicolo blinked confusion. “What?”

Yusuf pushed him away. “Same thing. Get the food.”

Nicolo returned with far more than breakfast. He had more sacks he must have pilfered, two changes of clothing, bread and food for at least three days, and a rucksack that could be slung over the shoulder to carry things. He even had bedrolls.

“Going somewhere?”

Nicolo nodded. “You know the region well.”

Yusuf crossed his arms over his chest and nodded.

“Good. Find us a place to bathe. A river, an untainted well.”

The urge to laugh at the man’s arrogance was distant, but he definitely felt it. “So now I’m your guide?”

“Call yourself whatever you wish, if you can find us a safe path away from this cursed city.”

Yusuf frowned. “The city of the prophets, peace be upon them, from which the last ascended to Heaven at the call of Allah, cannot be cursed.”

“That city of blood is cursed to me,” Nicolo said. “Perhaps in a year when rains and repentance have cleansed it of sin, but now? I beg of you, Yusuf, get us away. Please.”

Yusuf opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened and closed it again. Nicolo was his enemy. Had been his enemy. He didn’t know what they were, now, but they couldn’t be allies. “I can get you to Cairo….”

They followed a river west toward Jabalia. It took three days to escape all remnants of the invading army. They walked near the river and under trees when they could, Yusuf worried that refugees might see Nicolo’s clothes and sword and set upon him, and uncomfortable himself in the garb of Christians.

He might have mentioned that, and Nicolo might have said something stupid, and their tempers flared and they fought and died and woke up with blood all over.

Yusuf was disgusted with himself. “I have no other clothes,” he said. “Can we please stop doing this?”

“You started it.”

Nicolo wasn’t completely wrong.

He drew in a breath for strength. “Jabalia isn’t far. Let me trade what I can for things more suited to the desert. I’ll buy you anything you want when we get to Cairo. But let us get through the sands first?”

Nicolo was clearly unhappy with… everything, it seemed. “Just what do you intend to trade? What do you know about Cairo? And why are we traveling through the desert? Aren’t there roads to follow?”

Yusuf smoothed his mustache and beard, pausing with his hand on his own throat. It was possible they’d be dead again soon. “An army is coming from Cairo. If we’re seen? Me, I’d be fine. You?” He scrunched his nose, shook his head slightly. Edged a hand to his dagger.

He came back almost immediately. “Can you _please_ stop _doing_ that?” he yelled.

Nicolo was folded over his belly, grimacing over Yusuf’s dagger wound but clearly having escaped death. “I don’t know!” Nicolo yelled back. “When were you going to mention an army?”

“I had hoped to avoid the subject altogether.” It was troubling him, deeply. He should go back with them, help to reclaim the city. Avenge the deaths of all of those people. But if he did, Nicolo might think he needed to defend the crusaders and they would be enemies again. What was the point of them fighting each other to a death that never came?

Nicolo threw his hands up and made a disgusted sound.

“You asked me to get you away from that place,” Yusuf said, holding onto his patience by a thread.

Nicolo repeated the sound and stared, waiting.

Yusuf rubbed at his neck. “We’re going around the army.”

Nicolo pursed his lips tight and collected their things from the riverbank, stuffing them into a sack with impressive violence.

When they reached Jabalia without further mayhem, Yusuf stopped them in an olive grove. “Stay here. I’ll be back shortly.”

The grip on his arm threatened to rub bones together, but Nicolo just stared at him, mouth tight and brows furrowed. Those pale eyes were too expressive. They gave away too much.

“I played dead at your command back on the battlefield. That wasn’t easy, either. Also… please don’t kill anyone.” He fingered his ruined robe. “Anyone else,” he amended.

He rifled their belongings under a baleful stare which he ignored—he had many siblings—and returned as quickly as he could. An hour later they were on their way with more rations and refilled waterskins. Nicolo looked ridiculous in robes and a turban, with that pale skin and those pale eyes, but Yusuf was getting used to him, and no longer felt he looked sickly.

They pushed hard for a ten-day and stopped for rest when Yusuf was certain they were well south of danger. They camped by an oasis, where a local tribe had pitched a tent. Yusuf found a shared language and they only looked at Nicolo with curiosity, not fear. Nicolo rose the next morning and knelt in prayer, as he’d done every other day. Yusuf watched his different way of worship, even more strange now that he dressed in familiar clothes with a family of Arabs thirty yards away. Yusuf felt drawn to pray, but he had resisted his salahs since he’d seen the city sacked. He thought of Allah a great deal, and of the words of the Prophet, peace be upon him. But he couldn’t bring himself to pray.

When Nicolo rose from his knees, Yusuf asked, “What do you make of this?”

“Of what?”

Yusuf waved his hand to encompass them, their camp, the desert, the world. “This. The way our bodies can’t die. Everything.”

“I’m sure God has some plan.”

Yusuf raised his eyebrows. “You see God’s hand in this?”

“I see God’s hand in you,” Nicolo said.

Yusuf thought about the men dead by his hand. The brother he had killed for Nicolo. The soldiers he had killed in the city in his pain and rage. “What?”

“We stopped to fight. This… whatever has been done to us, it pitted us one against the other. If it had not, I would have been amidst the throngs who murdered countless innocents, committed depravities, desecrated holy sites, looted and burned… because of you, I wasn’t.”

“I also killed you a few dozen times,” Yusuf said, and reached into their bag for a fig.

Nicolo hadn’t laughed before, not fully like that; Yusuf turned back to watch how it changed his face. “Yes, well, we are both born of this war. But we are no longer a part of it.”

“I could return to the battle after I get you to Cairo.”

“You won’t.”

The slight pricked at his pride, but Nicolo waved a hand before Yusuf could challenge him. “I meant,” he said, crawling to Yusuf’s bedroll and sitting by his feet uninvited, “that you said you fought for a righteous cause. I too thought I was fighting for what was right. There is nothing right or righteous back there.”

Yusuf chewed on the fig, wondering. “You can’t think we’re free of war.”

Nicolo shook his head. “No. But perhaps together our compass will point truer, and we will do some good in the world. Why else would God choose us?”

Yusuf wasn’t sure that Allah had. But he took some comfort from the idea, and for the first time in days he was willing to pray. “Allah gave things to the world in pairs, like male and female. Perhaps you and I are a pair, Nicolo, undying and undying as we are.”

Nicolo pursed his lips as if considering the concept, then shrugged. “Time will tell.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to ElephantofAfrica for checking my Islamic references!
> 
> NOTES:  
> Google has not seen victory with Gaza; there is no way to map through it and no street view of a single road. Amazing and sad. 
> 
> I have an ironic way of using scripture for titles. It's reflective of how bad I am at coming up with titles. 
> 
> I keep envisioning a Joe who is a polyglot; and I wanted to see who these people were when they shared a language early. Joe is also, in my opinion the tenderest and most civilized of all of the characters because his culture was so enlightened in that era: libraries, universities, knowledge lost to Europe for centuries; multicultural cities. So--how to highlight his tenderness and humanity? Let him fight in the crusades. Uh... yeah. 
> 
> Al-Quds = Jerusalem  
> Mousa and Isa and Mohammed = Moses, Jesus, Mohammed (PBUT)  
> rakahs = the recitations of prayer  
> salahs = prayers  
> wudu = ritual preparation for prayer—cleaning up with good intentions  
> W’aleykom elsalam = May God’s peace and mercy be upon you
> 
> Fun facts most fans of this show probably already know:  
> Pigs and dogs were not favored animals in early Islam. Pig is still haram—as it is in observant Judaism.   
> Imazighen = probably Yusuf’s ethnicity; he likely wasn’t “Arab,” coming from the Maghreb at the time he did.   
> The moat around Jerusalem is referenced on the wall in the movie! 
> 
> Less fun facts: I’ve become fascinated with quoting scripture, because these two will each know their own (and eventually each other's, I presume) so intimately. It’s not intended to detract from the stories or to dog-whistle or in any way to insult or offend any faith practice. I have explicit bias toward Catholicism for Nicolo and Islam for Yusuf, for at least a couple hundred years. 
> 
> I quoted only Proverbs in this story, from the Holy Bible, v.16:9. We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ElephantofAfrica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElephantOfAfrica/pseuds/ElephantOfAfrica) for checking my Islamic references!
> 
> Fuller notes at end of story.


End file.
